Who among us hasn’t looked up at dawn
alarmed, wondered what it would be like
to be someone very ill and the vigilant song
signalling the end of darkness, beginning of light?
The darkest of the nestling on water’s edge,
hollow, decimated immaculate, a bare scrape
sanding hard whalebone into sculpture yet
the principal source of cures. Constrict caged,
our greater ailment a love of and fear we are incurable.
Enough remains to send us out at dusk in shallow
scars from absent suns falling away. Dredged vulnerable
faunal areas ask for extinction, a kindness, follow
with the rare loyalty of disfigurement. We murmur
our sterile prescriptions to ghosts, gods, mothers.
Roxanna Bennet is the author of The Uncertainty Principle: Poems (Tightrope Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in Existere, Descant, The Dalhousie Review, Caper Literary Journal, vallum: new international poetics, Slice Magazine, Popshot, CV2, and others, as well as in several anthologies.